Variations of the Wild Body. Photographs by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Variations of the Wild Body. Photographs by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

With his theory of Amerindian perspectivism, Viveiros de Castro has become renowned as one of today’s leading anthropologists. Initially, though, he worked as a photographer. In the 1970s, not only did he take some of best-known shots of the artist Hélio Oiticica and the poet Waly Salomão, but was also a still photographer for Ivan Cardoso, a key figure in the Cinema Marginal movement. In these years, Viveiros de Castro was already especially interested in the indigenous Amazon peoples of the Araweté, Kulina, Yanomami and Yawalapíti. In both these areas of his work, the question of the body forms a common horizon. The exhibition “Variations of the Wild Body. Photographs by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro” focuses on the body in urban space just as much as in the Amazon region, yet it also clearly reveals, based on 170 displayed photographs, how intricately intertwined artistic practice and anthropological ideas are in Viveiros de Castro’s work. The event’s provocative title is intended to disrupt existing associations of “wildness” and “nature”, “civilisation” and “urbanisation” and indicate alternative ways of thinking.

Do the indigenous people of the Amazon eat their enemies, or do they just tell that story to visiting anthropologists? And why do Brasilian Brazilian? poets and filmmakers celebrate anthropophagy as a principle of artistic creation? In a series of events, film screenings, an exhibition and an international conference, “Tropical Underground” explores the rich and complex intersections between anthropology, the avant-garde and globalization in Brazil since the 1960s.

An initiative of the Department for Theater, Film and Media studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and the Cluster of Excellence “The Emergence of Normative Orders” in cooperation with the Deutsches Filminstitut, the Weltkulturen Museum, the Museum Angewandte Kunst, the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and arte3 and SESC – São Paulo as part of the series of events of “Tropical Underground. Revolutions of anthropology and cinema”.